Black Ice

by Black, Regan

  No matter, Evie had been making her own luck for years now.

  “Can’t you go faster?” Tate asked Baker.

  He pressed on the accelerator and the wheels spun. “Not if I don’t have to.”

  “Are there chains on the tires?” she asked Wyatt. He shook his head. “Then turn south.”

  He pressed a finger to his lips, the universal signal for silence.

  “Keep her quiet,” Tate warned. “Karl, anything on the police scanner?”

  Evie turned to the man on her left. She hadn’t even noticed Karl working with a handheld scanner. “Nothing. I don’t know if the network is down or if they just aren’t moving.”

  “Both, most likely,” Wyatt said, echoing Evie’s thoughts.

  “They don’t believe you’ll get far,” she said. “I’d have to agree,” she added. Baker wasn’t giving her much confidence that he could handle this oversized vehicle in the deepening snow. “You realize you’re only a few blocks from the casino.”

  She suspected the snow was muddling Baker’s sense of direction, though there weren’t a great many ways to get lost once you were on the main highway.

  “Quiet,” Wyatt pleaded.

  “Let me out and I won’t be your problem anymore,” she snapped.

  “We should let her go,” Baker said. He glanced in the rearview mirror. “We dump her and keep going. Gives us a little space, especially if anyone follows us.”

  “Just keep driving,” Tate said. “We might need her later. If something happens to Wyatt, she can take over as our guide.”

  She glared at her old friend. “I hate you.” It was predictable and lame. It was so very high school, but it was the worst thing she could think of right now.

  “I know,” he replied.

  “I’ll never forgive you for this,” she added after another few minutes.

  “I know.”

  Was that all he had? “You were smart once. This… this is an unbelievable low. Even for you.”

  He faced her down. “What does that mean?”

  “You know.” She tried to avoid slamming into Wyatt as Baker momentarily lost control of the SUV again. There were videos online about how to escape zip ties. Why had she never watched them? “If you’re the guide, guide him to a safer route.”

  Tate swiveled in his seat. “She knows where we’re going?”

  “Of course not,” Wyatt said. “She isn’t supposed to be here at all.”

  She didn’t look away in time and the mean flare in Tate’s gaze made her shiver. He reached over and turned up the heat, aiming a vent right at her.

  “Better?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Better to agree with whatever he said at this point. When she’d seen pictures of Tate online, he’d seemed a polite professional. Of course now she knew it had all been a setup. In person, the hard edges were evident, along with a dark intent that frankly unnerved her.

  Questions pelted her from all sides, most of them about how Wyatt had ever gotten tangled up with Tate. She didn’t dare ask those. Instead, she wondered why the man had targeted her. It was silly to give in to her hurt feelings when she might be killed at any moment, on purpose or by Baker’s inexperience behind the wheel.

  “Why even pretend you were interested in my business?”

  “I wanted a tour of the area,” Tate admitted. “Your company was the best fit for me.”

  “Why?”

  “What are you doing?” Wyatt asked in a hiss.

  “Trying to understand how any of this happened.” She leaned forward, heedless that the blanket slipped forward. “Why, Mr. Cordell?” she repeated.

  “Cottonwood is a small company,” Tate answered. “A small company in some financial stress worked to my advantage, plus with off-season I was guaranteed the best possible local guide. You.”

  She sat back again and resumed her efforts to break free of the zip tie under the blanket.

  “Don’t pout, Evelyn,” Tate said. “When I contacted you, my hope was to get enough information from you so your old pal there couldn’t screw me over. He tells me we’ll have a tough time reaching the rendezvous point in this weather. I’m tempted to ask if you agree.”

  She didn’t want to know where the rendezvous point was. If he told her, an escape would be even more difficult. “We’ll have a tough time going another mile,” Evie muttered.

  “He warned me it would be easier to hike part of it.”

  She nearly choked. It was all she could do to keep the reaction off her face and keep her gaze away from Wyatt. They were driving north to a destination easier to reach on foot. Tate probably thought he was being vague, but Evie knew Wyatt too well. And like Wyatt, she knew the area too well.

  They must be headed toward the ghost town that had once been a thriving community during the Black Hills gold rush. If she could get away, and reach the police before she froze in the weather, the authorities might catch them in time.

  Beside her, Wyatt was stiff, a muscle in his jaw jumping, a sure sign of his frustration and stress. It shouldn’t have been any comfort at all and yet… it was a sign she recognized from long ago. That muscle would react whenever his mother embarrassed him or when he had to go smooth over her debts or insult with someone in town.

  If he was stressed about this, maybe he wasn’t here because he wanted to be. The outrageous thought stuck in her head, refused to budge. Did she have an ally in this car? She bumped his knee with her own.

  “Let me go,” she said. “I don’t care what you stole or where you’re going.” Baker took a curve too quickly and Karl fell into her, pressing her up against Wyatt. “He’s going to get all of us killed.”

  “Someone shut her up,” Tate ordered.

  As Baker straightened out the car, taking the majority of the narrow strip the plows had cleared, Karl pulled his scarf from around his neck and started to loop it over her head. Evie reared back, shoving herself more into Wyatt.

  “Hold her still,” Karl said.

  “Leave her alone,” Wyatt argued. He reached behind her and shoved Karl back. “She’s scared.”

  “Scared or not I can take you,” she snapped.

  From the front seat, Tate chuckled. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “A hostage with spunk. I like it.”

  Wyatt covered her mouth with a gloved hand before she could reply. His blue eyes locked with hers. She recognized his silent plea for her to cooperate. Subsiding, she righted herself as best she could considering Baker’s lack of control at the wheel. Her stomach was churning, the bad driving and being a hostage piling up.

  She didn’t care for Tate’s tone or the gleam of interest in his eyes when he looked at her. The man had a mean streak he’d hidden well. She supposed hiding and manipulation were good skills for a thief. That still didn’t explain how Wyatt got mixed up in all of this.

  Needing that answer, hoping her best friend hadn’t slipped beyond redemption, she sat back, deciding to bide her time. In this weather there would be an opening and when it came, she’d be ready to make her move, with luck, Wyatt would escape with her.

  Chapter Seven

  She hated him. She thought he was a criminal. He struggled to put the pain of that and the rest of his reeling emotions aside. It was too late to change anything for her and dividing his focus could prove disastrous.

  Mentally, he blasted Pickering and the FBI order to stand down. He resented that what should be a golden opportunity had devolved into a mess of epic proportions. The shock, disappointment, and anger he’d seen in Evie’s expressive gray eyes would haunt him for the rest of his days.

  Of course, those days might not add up to much if Baker didn’t get control of the vehicle.

  All his life, despite the ugly rumors and uglier truth that cycled through town about his mom, Evie had stood by him. Stood up for him. For as long as he could remember, she refused to lump him into the same category as his addicted mother. At every opportunity, she’d spout off about anything good he’d done, from acing a spelling te
st to helping her rebuild a snowblower.

  And how had he repaid her? He’d left without saying goodbye.

  She had valid cause to hate him long before he’d returned to Deadwood. Shame coursed through him for hoping he might have gotten in and out of town without seeing her. Although, in light of the situation, it clearly would’ve been better if he’d never seen her.

  So many things could have gone differently, if only he’d trusted her. Then and now.

  He sensed the shift in her body. Never one to give up, she was looking for the opening and fighting to break out of the zip ties so she could take it when it came.

  “Ease up on this curve, Baker,” he said.

  The man gripped the wheel harder. “You wanna drive?”

  “I will if you can’t,” Wyatt replied.

  “Baker drives.” Tate ended the discussion. “You said this road would get us to the spur.”

  “In clear conditions we’d be halfway to the turn-off by now,” Wyatt said. If he knew Evie, she’d figured out Cordell’s intended destination, but he wanted to make it clear. “You should’ve kept the original schedule,” he added to get under the man’s skin.

  Tate twisted in his seat. “If I’d waited, we’d have bad roads and cops on our tail. This is better.”

  In their initial calls, Cordell had struck Wyatt as an average thief and he wasn’t sure why the FBI was so hot to catch him, aside from the embarrassment that he kept escaping with small, prominent fortunes. In person, the well-above-average cunning came through. On the job, the man was intimidating and left no doubt about who was in charge.

  And now that he was sitting in the middle of the operation it was easier to understand how and why Cordell’s crew evaded the authorities. Cordell might appear to be acting randomly, but he’d thought through and anticipated every detail. He kept loyal men with him and created redundancies that protected them all from the new guy.

  Evie was a redundancy Cordell wasn’t ready to relinquish. He believed Evie and Wyatt were interchangeable. When it came to local trails, in clear weather, he was mostly right. But if Cordell had relied on coincidence to find a backup for Wyatt, the FBI would’ve caught him a long time ago. Despite the distraction of nasty weather, the man had to be somewhat suspicious of Wyatt taking this particular woman hostage.

  Based on the FBI’s background, a suspicious Cordell was a ruthless and dangerous man. With ice gathering on the inside of the windows, his priority shifted to protecting Evie over the FBI’s agenda. How was he going to get her out of this safely?

  Although Baker was learning how to handle the icy curves, Wyatt couldn’t shake the feeling that they were walking a tightrope. He’d been out here in storms only half as bad as Holly and he knew it was a matter of time before the roads became impassable. Plus, he’d hauled Evie out of the casino with no protection against the elements. Her uniform of black slacks, a crisp cotton shirt, the black and silver vest, western bolo tie, and the black heels would be no help when she did try to escape. And she would.

  Her best chance was if he could get them to turn back toward town. “It’s possible the spur we need hasn’t been plowed,” he said. “Or even salted.” That was assuming they could find the turn-off at all. Visibility was dwindling with every minute.

  Cordell shook his head. “You’re just now mentioning this?” he asked, his tone rumbling in a low growl. Ruthless. Dangerous.

  There was little point arguing, but Wyatt held his ground. “I mentioned it earlier. This morning and yesterday. You said the rendezvous schedule wasn’t negotiable.”

  Evie pressed her lower leg to his. He didn’t deserve anything close to support right this second, but he was damn happy to have it.

  “That’s why we moved early.” Cordell swore. “Figure it out, Jameson. There must be more than one road in this state.”

  Wyatt stopped Evie before she could say something provoking and tried to make sense of what he could see through the windows. It was all a haze of white, nearly impossible to distinguish the shadows of trees from rocky outcroppings. Cordell had researched the diamonds, the casino, and the people. Why hadn’t the man put more effort into researching the terrain?

  Because he’d hired Wyatt, an expert on the area who was disenchanted with all things legal after the military cut him loose for getting injured on a patrol. Then he’d tried to use Evie as research but this blasted winter storm interfered.

  The SUV slowed as Baker eased off the gas and coasted to a stop. Snow had drifted into a high bank that blocked the road. “What now?” He used the rearview mirror to shoot a dark look at Wyatt.

  “Remind me never to doubt the weather girl again,” Evie said. “At least she still has her job. Thanks to you, I’m sure my career at the Silver Aces is over.”

  “Better a job than your life,” Wyatt said. Dealing poker wasn’t a career for Evie anyway, but this was hardly the time to point that out.

  “Guess you’ll have to turn back,” Evie quipped. Her false cheer filled the vehicle and Wyatt knew he was the only one amused. “Can you manage a three-point turn or do I need to handle it?” she asked sweetly.

  Wyatt bumped her knee. “Knock it off.” He appreciated her attempt to be annoying enough that Cordell would toss her out, but it wasn’t in her best interest. They were too far from any shelter for her to survive the storm. He had to come up with something and fast.

  “Miss Cotton, listen to your pal and shut up,” Cordell agreed. “I’m waiting for a solution, Jameson.”

  She fixed her gaze on the windshield and wisely kept quiet. He did the same, watching the wipers slap uselessly against the heavy snowstorm. “Either we get out and hike from here or we back it up and take the next available road,” Wyatt said with a sigh. “In my opinion, we’re better off going back. A longer drive, but less risk of exposure in this weather.”

  Cordell turned to Evie. “You agree with him?”

  “I don’t know where you’re going,” she said. “Though the clearest route out of the storm is to the south.”

  Cordell scowled. “Of course you’d want us to go back through town.”

  Evie shrugged and Wyatt drew the thief’s attention. “Clear is relative,” he said. “This storm is massive.” But if they were closer to town, he could get her out of the car before guiding Cordell and his men the long way around to the ghost town. The GPS tracker in his wallet was built to hold up so the FBI could pick up their quarry. Every hour he could keep them in transition gave Evie a better chance to notify the authorities of their destination.

  “Do it,” Cordell said to Baker. “Turn around.”

  Baker’s hesitation was almost imperceptible, but it was something. Wyatt filed the reaction away. If he could get the others to turn on Cordell, their chances of survival increased. Slowly, with extreme caution Baker backed up until he had the space to turn the car around.

  “Excellent,” Evie declared. “You’ll get caught and I can clear my name. Hundreds of cameras cover the highway in Deadwood. No industry has more watchdog tendencies than the casinos.”

  He recognized her ramping up into a tirade and let her ramble, just to see Cordell’s reaction.

  “The law around here doesn’t cater to thieves and kidnappers,” she continued. “Even if you get away today, Sheriff Russell will track you down. You should—”

  He shoved his elbow into her ribs. “That’s enough, Evelyn.” He said her name with a sneer that he knew would get under her skin. One of the perks of knowing another person so well.

  She gawked at him. “You’re the worst.”

  He wished he could assure her he wasn’t. It was just more motivation to get both of them out of this in one piece so he could explain everything and prove he hadn’t given up on being an honorable man.

  “I’m not going to post bail or visit you in prison,” she said, nose in the air.

  “Shut up!” Cordell roared. “Or I’ll just shoot you and dump you in the snow for a bear.”

  “The bears are hib
ernating,” she said. The woman never knew when to quit.

  Cordell aimed a small revolver at her. Wyatt hadn’t known he was carrying that one in addition to the bigger, semi-automatic he’d used in the robbery. At this range the revolver could be deadly enough. Beside him Evie paled. “Easy,” Wyatt said. “She’s a complication we can turn to our advantage, especially in town.”

  “We’ll see.” Cordell lowered the gun.

  Evie didn’t look all that grateful. Wyatt knew she was fuming and plotting her way out of the vehicle. He didn’t blame her. In her place, he’d do the same thing. He just hoped she had the patience to let him assist.

  “If we end up going all the way through town having her along forces the cops to think twice before taking aggressive measures,” he said, outlining the main reason they should keep Evie with them. “Not to mention if something happens to me, you have your backup expert.”

  It wasn’t the smartest move to remind Cordell he was expendable, but worth it if it kept Evie alive. She was absolutely right about the cameras, although the lousy visibility played into Cordell’s favor. She was also spot on with her theory that the local authorities were waiting for them to kill themselves out here. The robbery was less than an hour old, but it was a safe bet the casino security and the sheriff’s office had already broadcast the make, model, and plate number for the SUV over every emergency channel.

  On top of that, Agent Pickering and her team were surely following the GPS tracker in his wallet. They were likely the only vehicle on the road in Deadwood right now, so there would be no mistaking them, no place to hide.

  Up front, Baker fiddled with the defrost setting to no avail. He leaned forward in the seat, both hands on the wheel again, struggling to pick out the best part of the road in a landscape that was a blur of white on white. The acceleration was subtle. Between the adrenaline and the slippery road Baker probably didn’t know his foot was heavy on the gas pedal.

  Cordell braced a hand on the dash.

  “Ease up, Baker,” Wyatt said. “No one’s expecting us to come back.” It wasn’t a lie. Regardless of the FBI tracker, this move wouldn’t be expected. “No need to rush.”